COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONIncomplete

CWE-1278

Missing Protection Against Hardware Reverse Engineering Using Integrated Circuit (IC) Imaging Techniques

Information stored in hardware may be recovered by an attacker with the capability to capture and analyze images of the integrated circuit using techniques such as scanning electron microscopy.

Abstraction

Base

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

Information stored in hardware may be recovered by an attacker with the capability to capture and analyze images of the integrated circuit using techniques such as scanning electron microscopy.

Extended description

The physical structure of a device, viewed at high enough magnification, can reveal the information stored inside. Typical steps in IC reverse engineering involve removing the chip packaging (decapsulation) then using various imaging techniques ranging from high resolution x-ray microscopy to invasive techniques involving removing IC layers and imaging each layer using a scanning electron microscope. The goal of such activities is to recover secret keys, unique device identifiers, and proprietary code and circuit designs embedded in hardware that the attacker has been unsuccessful at accessing through other means. These secrets may be stored in non-volatile memory or in the circuit netlist. Memory technologies such as masked ROM allow easier to extraction of secrets than One-time Programmable (OTP) memory.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Architecture and Design

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Varies by Context

Affected security scopes: Confidentiality

A common goal of malicious actors who reverse engineer ICs is to produce and sell counterfeit versions of the IC.

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Architecture and Design

Architecture and design approach

Detail
The cost of secret extraction via IC reverse engineering should outweigh the potential value of the secrets being extracted. Threat model and value of secrets should be used to choose the technology used to safeguard those secrets. Examples include IC camouflaging and obfuscation, tamper-proof packaging, active shielding, and physical tampering detection information erasure.